Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [135]
He was no dummy. He was here for the story. “Yeah.”
“Why’d you come back?”
I scratched my chin. “We had one thing left to do.”
He nodded like he knew. “Still checking items off your list?”
I stared at him. “Something like that.”
He stood off to one side while the cameraman got a better view. “Public record says you bought this piece of land. That true?”
I shaded my eyes, staring downriver and nodded.
“You got a name for it?”
I shook my head, remembering what Abbie had said, I didn’t tell that paper man everything.
“Okay, tell me this…would you do it again?”
I’ve given that a lot of thought. Sometimes, in weaker moments, I can second-guess myself. But then I remember. I nodded. “In a heartbeat.”
He scribbled in his notebook and walked backward. “You’ve been rather quiet the last year. Word is you’ve spent most of your time painting in your studio. That right?” I nodded. He shrugged and stepped in front of me. “So…I mean, what’s the reason? Why all the trouble?”
I considered him. “Take a deep breath.”
He looked at the cameraman, shrugged, then back at me with an uncomfortable smile. “What?”
“Take a deep breath.”
“Okay.”
“Now hold it.”
He spoke like a man who’d just taken a long drag off a joint. “How long?”
“Just hold it.”
He looked into the camera and shrugged. A minute passed. His face turned red. Another ten seconds and his face turned the shade of a beet. Finally, he let it out. He caught his breath, stared at me and held the microphone in my face. “That’s the reason.”
I walked to Bob’s plane, where the wind kicked up the dust and tickled my nose.
He leaned against the wing, watching the breeze rattle the marsh and shift the color from green to brown and back to green again. After several minutes he whispered, “You ever think about remarrying?” The look on his face was not one of pilot, or crop duster, or thief or adulterer, but of priest. Bob was taking my pulse. It was an honest question.
I shook my head and spun the wedding ring around my finger.
In the distance, a bell sounded, and then as if launched from a canon, dozens of dirty seagulls and ragged-looking pelicans appeared out of the marsh and headed en masse to the dock at St. Marys where, evidently, a shrimp boat was unloading. The bell continued ringing in the distance.
He leaned across the wing. “What now?”
Months ago, I had started carrying a copy of Abbie’s wish list in my wallet. I pulled it out, unfolded it and read back through each one. “It’s simple, really. I paint what my talent will allow…and every now and then Abbie visits me.”
“Sounds painful.”
A long silence followed.
I folded the article and slid it into my wallet. “Yes…” I filled my chest, sucking in deeply. “Hurts like hell. And that’s good.”
WHEN I WOKE UP, the floodwaters had risen and the undercurrents tore at me in ways I could not defend. It flooded my banks, spread wider and threatened to swamp my island.
But time does heal. Not like we think it does, not like we would—from the front—but more from the back or side or someplace we can’t see it coming. It bubbles up beneath and rises all around. All of a sudden I dried my eyes long enough to look up, look beyond myself, and discovered my pain had become the sinew that held me together. I stood on the bank, stared out across the vast epicenter of me and faced a choice—do I risk the river? So I cut the water, paddled out of my own black hole and discovered that the river was not one but many, and like it or not, they all merge. Each turn, each bend, led to something beautiful, something whole, something worth remembering. Why? How? I can’t answer that. I just know she kept her promise. She was waiting. And there in that Devil’s Elbow, I found the glue that connects the pieces of me.
Tides ebb, rivers flow crooked, and love uses pain.
Bob waved his hand back across the river. “After I got out of jail, I wanted a place to hide. Some place with no past. A short time later, I bumped into Gus and he befriended me. And unlike others, he didn’t hold me against me. I asked him why and he told me